Paranoia
by Fate VII
Summary: So everyone's heard about the tales of Bakura snapping and killing everyone. But has anyone wondered if Yami might just be similarly stressed? Five thousand years is a long time to wait...


Fate: Well now. Er. Well. Er.

Disclaimer: RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! IT'S NOT OURS!

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{stage one}

He had been waiting centuries for this.

Centuries upon centuries, millennia upon millennia, loathing coating his soul in cloying folds. He had lain, trapped in a piece of gold by his own foolish devices. He had waited, dreaming of the day when he would wipe the pestilence that haunted him from the earth.

His resurrection had given the possibility life. He had prowled awake throughout the nights and scowled into the sun by day, his former dreams slowly becoming reality as the delicate lattice of a plan was modeled, so gently and with the barest whispers of intentions behind each strand that it went unnoticed.

The plan had been woven to perfection, a beautiful trap that was almost seductive in its sheer beauty and exactness. Each strand was poised to spring, venom and glue dripping from it to snare each player into his production and to set his glorious machination into swift and brutal motion.

He had waited so long for this.

Revenge was not sweet.

Revenge was lust and insanity and desire, bitter and bloody on his tongue.

He licked his lips slowly, his eyes closed.

"Hello, Yami."

His opening eyes showed that Ryou stood before him, touching the edge of the glass countertop with pale fingers, green-black eyes fixed on him from beneath his unkempt mop of moonfire hair. 

"Bakura Ryou..." The words slid from his lips as a hiss, giving the name a strange, sensuous twist that was oddly suitable for the chaste, unspoilt boy trustingly facing him.

Sooty eyelashes flickered. "Do you...?"

"Have your order in?" he inquired, showing his teeth in a mockery of a smile. "Of course. Come into the storeroom?" he invited, drawing aside the divider and ushering the boy inside.

Ryou opened the storeroom door and stepped inside. His own smile turning to a feral snarl, he followed. As the door fell shut behind them and Ryou turned instinctively to watch it, the boy's eyes fell upon his transformation. Green-black eyes widened, suggestive as well as petrified. The other's lips were parted as breathing quickened. He smiled more widely, knives and razors and blood in his gaze as he prowled forwards.

Perfection.

His tongue passed over his lips once more before he leapt, pinning his prey to the spiderweb strands and beginning to drain him of his lifeblood, his purity, his innocence.

He smiled with a mouthful of blood and then lowered his head to those tantalizing parted lips, biting and licking and taking what he was owed, teasing mercilessly and growing stronger with the terrified whimpers he was eliciting with every touch. Skin on skin, teeth on flesh, blood slippery on bone.

He watched as his prey drew breath to scream, then swallowed the cry and smirked into the horrified eyes staring wildly up at him, pleading silently for a semblance of humanity to grow where there had been none for an eternity.

{stage two}

He clung to the shelves, peering at his darker as he crouched over the fallen body of his friend, torn between two worlds. Bile rose in his throat as the tangy scent of blood reached his nostrils and he closed his eyes, swallowing and praying that it would be gone when he opened his eyes. 

"Pray to God that it will go away?"

He closed his eyes even tighter and clenched his fingers around the shelf, refusing to acknowledge reality.

A damp, sticky hand fell on the back of his neck and the scent of blood was breathed onto his face. "I am God."

The well-bred arrogance mixed ice with the hot terror coursing through him. Lips pressed into his for a brief second, then drew back. "Can you taste the hatred? Can you taste..._him?_"

He shuddered, involuntarily swallowing Ryou's blood and then gagging on it. "It disgusts you." A lick at his temple. "Good."

A sudden striding away allowed him to open his eyes slightly without flinching. He stared wordlessly at Ryou, paralyzed in body while kicking and screaming in spirit as his darker picked up the broken boy and slammed him against a wall.

A soft whimper came from his lips. The darker one whirled, dropping Ryou to the ground as he did so. "Do you not like this? Does it not give you pleasure to destroy the one who caused us so much pain?"

He shook his head, the barest of movements in his neck muscles signifying the negative. "You're going to kill my friend."

His darker smiled, a sudden delighted expression that reminded him of sunshine and arcades and games and summer. "Yes."

He gaped at his darker while he whirled back to Ryou, lifted him again, and pushed him up against the now-bloody wall. "Come out." The hiss resonated in the empty, echoing room. "Come out and face me or I'll kill you both now." A knife appeared in the dark one's hand, passed across a tongue before pressed to a pale and terrified boy's neck. "Are you as much of a coward as you were all those years ago? Your cowardice makes this infinitely less entertaining."

"Yami, no," he gasped, pressing his hands to his ears and falling to his knees, closing his eyes against the sight and sound of Ryou with tears streaming down his bloody face, whimpering in abject fear with disbelieving eyes. "Don't hurt him...please, Yami, let him go..."

"I will do as I please. You do not challenge God's right to give life and take it, and you will not challenge mine!" The scream was raw and angry, cutting through the hands he clamped to his ears to block out the noise. "Come out! Get out here and face me!"

He opened his eyes just a touch to see the flash of gold. The boy that appeared was white with anger and had burning red eyes, clutching knives with furiously shaking hands. 

"I'm out."

{stage three}

The wall hurt him. Everything hurt him. Everything...

Yami whirled on him and pressed a finger to his lips, grinding the digit into the slashes on the tender flesh. "You will say nothing to him. You will not beg him to counter anything I say. You will not condemn him but inwardly assure him you are lying just like always. You will say nothing to him. You will not even _think_ of it. I can hear you. I can see into your mind. Even between the two of you there is no privacy. One word from you, one syllable from you, and both of you die."

His breath was coming painfully quick and shallow as tremors wracked his body. He looked at his darker, feeling a sick terrible knowing that he himself would soon become the pawn in a yami no game. His darker's eyes were fixed on him furiously. The vessel had been wounded and he was twitching in sympathetic pain.

He felt the knife bite into his skin and shivered at the feel of blood collecting on his collarbone. He gulped bloody saliva tremulously and stared at his darker self pleadingly. 

"Don't touch my host." Lazily, carelessly, his darker was a marvelous actor in voice but worthless in body, with muscle tension betraying his confusion and fear.

Soft whimpers came involuntarily from his throat as the maddening tears kept coursing down his face, slowly closing off his air as surely as the razor-edged weapon pressed to his neck.

"Leave him alone!" Yugi was huddled on the floor behind Yami, shaking visibly but still defending him.

Yami whipped around and kicked Yugi in the ribs. "Are you my hikari or are you not? Do you want revenge or do you not? Choose God or choose Hell, aibou." Ire made the former pharaoh's countenance demonic. When Yugi had subsided into soft panic-stricken sobs, Yami turned back to his darker. "Turn around and put your hands together behind your back."

His darker stared disbelievingly. 

He slid to the floor, watching his darker during his loose-limbed descent. "Do it or you both die here and now. Do as I say!"

His darker slowly obeyed, fury and terror crossing his dark carmine eyes in flashes. "You will not try and escape. You will both die if you do. You will do nothing at all. You will not speak. You will not move. You will obey me, you petty, worthless, ungodly, filthy bastard of a blasphemer!" The final words were an animal roar followed by the crash of shelves falling, narrowly missing Yugi. The pharaoh kicked out, sending his darker to his knees abruptly. His hands moved swiftly, binding his darker's hands and cutting off the blood, then wrapping the rope around his ankles. Lastly Yami looped the rope around his darker's throat, ensuring that if his dark half moved any of his limbs, he would throttle himself. 

"Now." Yami turned to him, huddled in a cocoon of wordless fear against the wall. "I have waited five thousand long years for this." One hand was held out to him as he pressed back against the wall, feeling the blood squelch between his skin and the paint. "Five thousand years." It was a soft, sensual purr. "Burn in Hell."

{stage four}

He was practically panting in horror and rage, clenching his teeth to the point of creaking, feeling the ache and welcoming it. It was checkmate. Move and die, freeze and die. The king had broken all the rules, captured all the pieces, and smashed the board to splintered shards.

"Mind Crush!"

The habit of caution and fear for his life that had haunted him for seventeen long years while alive and thousands more while in a shadowy limbo halted him ignobly in place as screams burst out, ripping through his mind and shredding his nerves. There was a piercing shriek, then a terrible, breathless, empty silence.

He opened one eye, then both as he stared. He gritted his teeth and began trying to force his swollen, numbed fingers to wrestle with the knots, untying the coarse twine that bound the blood to either side of his wrists and then his ankles as well, freeing his neck so he could breathe.

Yugi lay in a broken heap in front of Ryou, his eyes slightly open and empty of life. His bloodied hikari's chest rose and fell dizzyingly quickly, breathing in short, painful gasps. "Yugi...Yugi...Yugi..."

The pharaoh staggered, then fell heavily to the ground, wrapping his fingers around Yugi's neck and squeezing out the nonexistent breath. "You fool! How dare you stop me! How _dare_ you defy God! You utter, Hell-destined fool!" Yami began beating Yugi's head on the floor senselessly, raving and screaming. Ryou shrank back from the chaos before him, his eyes darting around ceaselessly for the comfort that could not be found.

It was with a savage pleasure that he stretched out his own hand to the pharaoh and clenched his fingers together as the Ring sparkled on his chest.

Yami collapsed over his bludgeoned hikari, as senseless as the murdered lighter half. He spat at the pharaoh, stood, wavered, then ripped the soul card to shreds and dashed it to the ground. He then dropped inadvertently to his hands and knees as his numbed limbs gave way and crawled to his hikari, who was rapidly losing touch with the horrifying reality and regressing into blissful hysteria.

He pinned the lighter one's arms behind his back, then wrapped his arm around the other's chest as Ryou began screaming, fighting and writhing in his grip, the strength of madness matching the strength of darkness but giving way to fear and hopeless sobs.

He pulled Ryou's head back and bit him where his jaw met his neck, then bit him again on the mouth, pulling him into himself and biting the exposed skin in a purely animal reaction, taming him in the only way he knew. "You can do nothing...you're useless...you can't do anything now...you have no power...you can't do anything...give in..."

Bite.

And slowly Ryou stopped fighting and melted into him, helpless, broken sobs tearing through his frail, shattered frame. He licked the bite mark on the lighter one's neck, then buried his face in his light's hair as terror overwhelmed him.

"Where do we go from here?" Confusion and fear swamped him. "Where do we go?"

Ryou's breath hitched with sobs as his horrified, shattered dark clung to the one thing he understood.

"He killed his own other half." He stared blindly into the empty room as he listened to Ryou's shaking, tormented voice. "All to kill me...to kill you..."

{owari}

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Fate: *looks around for Duel* Oh dear. Well, review.


End file.
